


Look Back Without Anger

by fredbassett



Series: Stephen/Ryan series [104]
Category: Primeval
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-12
Updated: 2016-10-12
Packaged: 2018-08-22 02:06:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8268662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fredbassett/pseuds/fredbassett
Summary: Captain Joel Stringer looks back at the more disreputable parts of his life.





	

Joel Stringer pushed down the door handle with his elbow and manoeuvred into the room carrying two mugs of tea, a packet of chocolate biscuits clamped under one arm.

Abby was sitting cross-legged on a massive cushion in the corner, something small and furry cradled on her lap, suckling hungrily from a bottle.

“Should I have brought a feeding bottle for you, too?” he asked.

She looked up, smiling, but he was all too conscious of the dark circles under her eyes. They’d had a busy couple of weeks on anomaly shouts, with sleep a scarce commodity for most of the team, but when the rest clocked off, Abby stayed on call as surrogate mother to the host of animals currently residing in the zoo at Farnley Hall, the ARC’s recently acquired outpost in Kent.

Their latest addition had wandered through an anomaly in West Wickham. They’d arrived in time to herd several raccoon-like Kopidodons back through a rapidly-fading anomaly but had found this little chap too late. He’d been in the corner of a garden, backed into a flowerbed by a large and distinctly formidable ginger tomcat. The pair of them had been engaged in a spitting match of epic proportions, even though the Kopidodon had not even finished weaning, according to Abby.

Since them she’d insisted on taking the night shifts herself. Stringer had distributed a few choice epithets to all and sundry when he’d found out, but both of the assistant keepers had cheerfully told him they were more scared of Abby than they were of him, which had put him firmly in his place.

“He’ll have finished in a minute,” she told him. “But you can feed me a biscuit, I’m starving.”

“When did you last eat?” He settled down next to her on the cushion and started wrestling the biscuit package into submission.

“Breakfast?” she hazarded.

He rolled his eyes. “It’s now mid-afternoon.”

She bit into the biscuit he held out to her, showering the dark-furred bundle on her lap with crumbs. “I’ve been busy. The Scutosaurus went into labour this morning.”

“Everything OK?” They’d found the heavily-pregnant creature wandering disconsolately around the anomaly cluster on the other side of Farnley Hall’s permanently open anomaly, but had failed to find one that led to the right time period. It looked like the relevant one had recently closed, but if Connor’s observations from a few weeks ago had been correct, it would open again soon, and when it did, Abby was hoping to get their temporary visitor, complete with her new family, home again.

“She’s fine, and so are both the babies. According to Ricky, they’re the ugliest little sods he’s ever seen, and to be honest, I think he’s probably right.”

Stringer grinned. Ricky Carey was their comms specialist, responsible for co-ordinating all their forays into the past. He claimed to be allergic to fur, feather and scales, but that didn’t stop Abby roping him in when she needed an extra pair of hands and no one else was free.

The Kopidodon gulped the last few mouthfuls from the bottle and then thrust its nose into the crook of Abby’s arm, snuggling down to sleep. Abby ruffled the soft fur and leaned against Stringer’s shoulder.

“You need a decent night’s sleep,” he told her. “Can’t someone else do the night shift for once?”

To his relief, she nodded. “Frankie will take over in a couple of hours. She’s been in bed with a bloody awful bug, but she say’s well enough to sleep over tonight.”

Frankie Hughes was their resident vet. Abby trusted her, despite the woman’s past problems with alcohol, and from what Stringer had seen, Frankie had started to turn her life around. Together, the two women ran the animal holding facility, doing their best to repatriate as many creatures as possible as quickly as they could.

Stringer slipped his arm around Abby. She wriggled into a more comfortable position on the cushion without disturbing the sleeping Kopidodon on her lap.

“You can stroke him, if you like,” she said. “He seems to like the contact.”

Stringer reached over and ran his fingers tentatively over the little animal’s soft fur. He’d been an animal rights activist before he joined the army and he much preferred it when then were able to get the creatures home unharmed, and help ones that needed it. He’d never taken any pleasure in ending a life, even when it had been necessary to save himself and others from harm, although there were a few raptors he’d have happily made an exception for, but thankfully they didn’t come across those evil little bleeders too often.

“How long’s he going to have to say for?” he asked, still stroking the Kopidodon.

“Hard to tell. We’ve got no real idea how fast they grow up, and then it’ll depend on how well he’ll cope in the wild.”

“And whether a suitable anomaly appears?”

“That’s less of a worry. At the rate some of them appear and disappear in spaghetti junction, it’s a bit like waiting for a London bus. Hang about long enough and one will appear that’s going in the right direction.”

He pressed a kiss to the side of her head. “I bet you never thought you’d end up in a job like this, did you?”

She turned to him, angling her face for a kiss. “There were times when I never thought I’d end up in a job at all. They weren’t exactly fashionable where I lived.”

When they drew apart, Stringer said, “Bit like that where I came from. Mind you, nicking cars and breaking and entering were pretty good life-skills for a career in the army. My first CO was most impressed when I got into his wife’s Beamer in five seconds flat, especially since he’d forgotten to renew her RAC sub and was too scared to tell her.”

“How did you manage to get into the army with a criminal record?”

Stringer grinned at her. “Simple, I never got caught.”

“What made you go straight?”

He stroked Abby’s hair lightly and felt her relax against him. “A Detective Sergeant in Liverpool called Tim Dancy. He knew what I was up to, but couldn’t ever manage to pin anything on me, but he came closer than most. I was out on the piss with a bunch of lads in Toxteth one night – think Brixton without the taste and refinement – and things started to kick off. The cops had gone in heavy on a drugs bust and had wound a few people up. Bottles started flying around and one thing led to another. Half an hour later, there were cars on fire, shop-fronts kicked in, stuff being looted, the lot. The place had been like a tinder-box for weeks and the shit from the Drugs Squad was the final straw.”

The little Kopidodon started mewling again. “Hush,” Abby told it, gently prizing its mouth open and slipping the teat of the bottle back between its lips. A moment later it was suckling enthusiastically again. “Go on, Joel.”

“Tim Dancy had been in the area with a young DC, following up some enquiries. They were right in the middle when the balloon went up. It wasn’t the right time or place to be a copper. She got a glass in her face and he got walloped with a brick trying to keep half a dozen hyped-up kids off her.” The memory of a young woman, no more than 26, with blood pouring from a four inch gash in her cheek came vividly back to mind. He shrugged. “I didn’t like the odds. They were only doing their jobs. No one deserved shit like that. So I waded in. I was known for being a nasty little fucker, so the rest of them backed off, especially when I cracked the ends off a couple of bottles and started to really have a go.”

It had been touch and go whether any of them would make it out of the middle of the riot alive, but he’d managed to get both of the injured police officers into a back alley and they’d held out until the Riot Squad had waded in. All three of them had ended up in hospital. Tracey Milburn the female PC, had needed fifty stitches and extensive plastic surgery; Tim Dancy ended up with a fractured skull.

“What about you?” Abby asked, when he’d finished the story.

“Three broken ribs, a knife in the arm and an abiding hatred of mob rule.”

“So how the hell did the back-street kid from Toxteth end up at uni and Sandhurst?”

“Tim told me that if I was bright enough to have given him the run around for the last four years, I was bright enough to knuckle down at school, pass my exams and go to university. I was a cocky little fucker, even at 15, but Tim had been round the block a few times and he was out of my league when it came to a fight, even with a fucking great big gash in his head. I’d seen what he could do and I respected him. When he came out of hospital, he transferred to Manchester and effectively took me with him. My mam was only too glad to get shut of me. Tim pulled some strings and got me in a school over there and…” Stringer’s voice tailed off and he pressed a kiss to the top of Abby’s head. “To cut a long story short, I cleaned my act up and decided I didn’t like anything being hunted for the pleasure of the kill. Blood sports aren’t much fun when you’ve been on the receiving end of them.”

“What happened to them?”

“Tim retired five years ago and runs a bar on Malta. Tracey’s now Assistant Chief Constable in Merseyside. We get together once a year if we can, usually at Tim’s place.” He was silent for a moment, then said quietly, “If we can get time off together, I’d really like you to meet them. If it wasn’t for them, I would probably have ended up dead of a drug overdose or wrapped round a lamppost in a nicked car.” He smiled at the swift leap of pleasure in Abby’s vivid blue eyes when he’d mentioned wanting her to meet his friends.

“I’d love that, thank you,” she said.

“You’ll like them,” he told her.

And he knew they would like her. He was as sure of that as he’d been of anything in his life.


End file.
